Tauranga City Council wants to restrict sex work in residential areas. Photo/Getty Images
Tauranga City Council wants to restrict sex work in residential areas. Photo/Getty Images
Councillors in Tauranga are clashing with prostitutes over a rule that would force home-based sex workers to operate alone.
Tauranga City councillors have asked the council's policy team to look for a way to enforce a rule that only one prostitute can operate out of a property in a residential area.
The New Zealand Prostitutes' Collective has slammed the move, saying it would put sex workers' safety at risk as well as unfairly limit a legal business.
The council had legal advice that its Prostitution Bylaw 2008, currently up for review, could be open to a court challenge on its treatment of small owner-operated brothels.
Currently, only one-person home-based commercial sex businesses were excluded from rules restricting brothels to parts of the city's CBDs not within 100m of schools, daycares or churches.
Morris said his issue was not with sex workers but with their clients, and that his personal religious beliefs had no bearing on his stance.
He said that if sex workers were not safe from their clients, then neither were other people in their neighbourhoods - all the more reason prostitution should be restricted to commercial or industrial areas.
"Would you want it in your street?"
United Future MPs Larry Baldock (left) and Gordon Copeland announcing the launch of their petition to throw out prostitution laws in 2003. File photo
In a council meeting, Morris described reports of men "preparing themselves" while waiting on the side of the road for appointments with prostitutes.
He later confirmed to the Bay of Plenty Times that by "preparing" he was referring to "lewd" acts.
"Bulls***," said Sue Forbes, Tauranga-based regional co-ordinator for the New Zealand Prostitutes' Collective, in response to the behaviour Morris reported.
"It doesn't happen."
Discretion, she said, was paramount in the business and clients would go to lengths to avoid being noticed.
She said at the very least sex workers should be allowed to work in pairs for safety reasons and to share operational business costs.
Forbes said she knew of only "a handful" of private home workers in Tauranga. Most - including those visiting the city "on tour" - worked in brothels or from motel rooms.
She said the idea of queues of clients forming overestimated how busy most of those workers were. Forbes said the most clients she ever saw in a day was seven - an extraordinarily busy day.
Online escort directory New Zealand Girls had 41 listings in Tauranga, of which 18 women were labelled "now touring". Some profiles were connected to escort agencies.
A Tauranga City Council spokeswoman said there were five licensed brothels in the city, but had no information about the number of home-based operations.
The collective's national co-ordinator, Dame Catherine Healy, said councils often misunderstood the four-worker rule in the Act.
The four people operating together had to be equal partners, each in charge of their own earnings - a rare arrangement in practice.
Dame Catherine Healy. Photo/Mark Mitchell
If one person acted as the manager of even one sex worker, that person was a brothel operator and must hold a brothel operator certificate, Healy said.
She said Tauranga had some of New Zealand's most "hostile" rules for prostitutes and a new one-person cap for residential areas would make it worse.
"That kind of approach compromises the safety of a sex worker.
"Each council should do its best to uphold the aims of the Prostitution Reform Act."
Not all prostitutes wanted to work in a commercial brothel, she said, with more and more preferring to have control over their own earnings.
Dame Healy said the rule was also unfair: A lawyer operating a business from home was free to have employees and invite criminals into their residential neighbourhood for appointments
She said prostitution was a "quiet activity in the main".
"If you strip it away, people do a lot of things in residential areas that have to do with sex."
A Tauranga neighbourhood. File photo/George Novak
'What's that noise, mum?' Brothel neighbours speak out
Three people who live next door to brothels in Tauranga say sex work has no place in residential neighbourhoods.
A woman on Devonport Rd, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, described her two years living in a unit adjoining a brothel as "a living nightmare" with confused clients banging on her door and summer days marred by the sounds of sexual transactions drifting through blacked out but open windows.
She had no moral issue with the business but thought it belonged in commercial or industrial areas.
Bill Rhodes, who lived behind a house in Greerton where a prostitute worked, said his main complaint was the "stigma" of a brothel and its potential impact on property prices.
"I don't mind what a person uses their body for as long as it doesn't hurt me and my quality of life that I have worked hard for," he said.
The owner of a neighbouring house said her tenant - her sister, a mother of a 4-year-old - could hear the sex going on next door.
"Uuuh, uh, uh," she mimicked. "I've actually heard it."
"[The preschooler] doesn't need to hear that. 'What's that noise, Mum?' she asks," said the homeowner, who asked to remain anonymous.
She said she was a churchgoer and had moral issues with sex work even though it was legal. Having it going on next door affected her "psychologically", she said.
None of the neighbours reporting seeing clients behaving in a lewd manner in the street while waiting for an appointment, as Morris reported.
Nor did any have much faith in the council's ability or willingness to enforce the Prostitution Bylaw it already had.
Under the Prostitution Reform Act, territorial authorities can make a bylaw to regulate the location and signage of commercial sexual service businesses.
Wellington-based post-doctoral researcher Calum Bennachie of Kingston University in London, an expert in prostitution in New Zealand, said only 14 out of 67 territorial authorities in New Zealand had enacted a prostitution bylaw, including Hamilton and Rotorua.
"Sadly most were written as knee-jerk reactions."
Some councils had amended their bylaws over time, he said or folded them into general bylaws, but most had simply never made one.
